May 30, 2013

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly
Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other
movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the
VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape
with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the
others, Re-Animator the third; quite the
triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of
quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to
encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly
Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghostbusters,
the ne plus ultra of comedy--my eleven-year-old
self still a couple of years away from Monty Python--and the requisite
throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this
analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn't have to
hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be
told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence
(but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the
easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an
African-American man I'd never seen on SNL (which was on too late for
me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs..
He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a
quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed
his minority status in a few scenes that aren't the slightest bit
threatening. Eddie Murphy's Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike
cultural brother E.T.--the outsider hero with special abilities who,
mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

by
Walter Chaw In the always-risky practice of adaptating theatre for the
silver screen, the first instinct usually has something to do with
"expanding" a play by providing the characters backstory, followed
fast by moving some of the dialogue into a different environment and/or
pulling the source out of time to "modernize" it or to provide new
resonance for a politicized piece. Richard Loncraine's Richard
III and Julie Taymor's Titus are examples
of affected adaptations that work; Michael Cacoyannis's The
Cherry Orchard and Oliver Parker's The Importance
of Being Earnest are examples that do not.

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is
not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing
of The
Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up,
ostensibly a children's story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn't just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who
falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti's swimming pool: it's also a deranged
manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like
Shyamalan--playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas,
collected in a volume modestly titled "The Cookbook"--against
critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy
move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say
for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban's beast-ravaged movie
reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall
to christen "Eaglet." Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith
and his son Jaden, After
Earth covers much the same ground, down to its
repetition of both the aquila
ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A
double-sided spear is a "cutlass" in the future, while walking
stealthily is now "ghosting." No word on what we call spoons or
actual cutlasses.) Lady
in the Water's world-building by crayon doodles can be
explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there's no
excuse for After
Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty
survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

by Walter Chaw As documents for the
opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest,
angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without
apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods
and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his
cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them.
It surmises a future where the government plants stories in
centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by
providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical
mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial
theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea
for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback
Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle
for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion
and brio--it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents
it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero
an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his
erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman),
transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents
and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel,
but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in
the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

by
Walter Chaw A little late to the
party, I know, but Kenji Mizoguchi's magisterial jidaigekiSansho the
Bailiff is the source material for Hiyao Miyazaki's Spirited
Away.
Both are initiated by the filmmakers as fairytales, mythologies; and
both are
initiated within the text by a specific fatal flaw in parental figures.
In Sansho,
it's hubris when the father, a principled public servant, stands up
under an
unjust edict and is exiled, leaving his family in peril. In Spirited
Away,
the parents engage in an endless banquet, indulging their gluttony
until
they're transformed into literal swine despite the protests of their
child.
Both films are withering indictments of the cultures that produced
them, and
each is opened to a greater depth of interpretation by an appreciation
of the
other. Coming here from the Miyazaki, it's fruitful to consider why it is the Mizoguchi is named after the villain, the cruel
slave-owner who
tortures the film's heroes, while the Miyazaki is named for the
innocents (Sen
to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) and the loaded act/word "Kamikakushi," which once referred to abduction by angry gods but has a
contemporary implication of sex trafficking. Arguably, Mizoguchi sets
up this
read of the later text in his own canon, with many of his films
addressing the
problem of sexual exploitation among the lower class in Japanese
history--a
problem that persisted through the war years and, some would say,
beyond. With its naming, it's possible to infer that the source for the ills in Sansho
the Bailiff is too strong a hold on the traditions of an
antiquated past;
in Spirited Away, it's the frittering away of the
future by a generation
too solipsistic, too blinkered by its own sense of entitlement, to save
itself
from obsolescence. See the two films as bookends of a particularly
Japanese
introspection, equal parts humility and nihilism. (As one of the
characters in Sansho
the Bailiff sings, "Isn't life a torture?") And in the
contemplation of the Mizoguchi, find also an undercurrent of warning,
and doom,
in the Miyazaki.

by Bill Chambers
Ted Kotcheff's
melancholy First Blood opens with Vietnam vet John
Rambo looking up a fellow soldier and discovering that the man has
died. Sullen, he hits the road, only to be harassed by the town sheriff
(Brian Dennehy), who sees long-haired drifters wearing surplus jackets
and thinks: Troublemaker. Possessed of a disposition similar to that of
Bill Bixby's David Banner, Rambo 'Hulks out' after being stripped of
his dignity in the bowels of the police station, escaping his jailers'
clutches and squealing off into a mountainous region of the Pacific
Northwest on a stolen motorcycle. His mission is one of
self-preservation; Rambo doesn't start committing premeditated murder until the sequel.
(Unlike in the David Morrell source novel, where Rambo is a veritable
serial killer, however justified his rage.)

May 29, 2005|As
far as I'm concerned, by and large, when the conversation turns to
animation, you have Brad Bird and Pixar in the United States and
Satoshi Kon, Hayao Miyazaki, and Yoshiaki Kawajiri in Japan. Animation
has a long way to go in the U.S., not in terms of technology but in
terms of a willingness to see it as a medium for mature storytelling
rather than as a ghetto for sub-par children's entertainment. Stuff
like Shark Tale and Shrek make
overtures to an "adult" audience with sexual innuendo, disturbing
violence, and pop cultural riffs that may raise unsettling questions
about existential substance (does any of this stuff exist outside of
its own reflectivity?), yet do little to stimulate real excitement.
They're failures, sometimes outrageously popular ones, trapped in amber.

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I love
its freedom and its exuberance, its sense of fun and its creativity. I
love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a
launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its
genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt
technophobia. Where The Blair Witch Project
skewered trust-fund kids picking a particularly unfortunate senior
project, Cloverfield takes on twentysomething
urbanites on top of the world in Manhattan, celebrating the departure
of one of their own on the night the chickens come home to roost.
There's no explanation of the mayhem in Cloverfield
beyond that a monster has attacked and that the recoil its rampage
spawns inevitably resembles memories of our collective scarring by
9/11. All it does, really, is clarify that when people at Ground
Zero referred to the falling of the WTC as "just like in a movie," it
didn't point to a divorce from reality but to an inability, utterly, to
conceive of anything so epoch-shaking as possible outside the prism of
our precious, silver-graven images. The history depicted in our films
is the only history we know.

by Walter Chaw In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles,
weary of the way that Hollywood portrayed people of colour, set out
under the guise of a non-union skin flick to make Sweet
Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, the highest-grossing
independent feature of its time, and easily the most influential
African-American picture of the modern age. It featured a black man as
its mustachioed hero, sexual and virile, unafraid to stand up to police
corruption and the stultifying social oppression of "the man" ("Rated X
by an All-White Jury," its poster proclaimed), and it allowed him to
rebel without punishing him in the final reel--a radical idea then, a
radical idea now. Mario Van Peebles, thirty-three years after the fact,
has crafted a surprisingly edged ode to the making of his father's
film, Baadasssss! (originally titled How
to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass), which manages the
tricky feat of replicating the insouciant rebellion of Melvin's
political, if not cinematic, masterpiece while somehow sidestepping the
trap of hagiography. Melvin, played by Mario, comes off as a man of
principle, but also an adulterer, callous towards the needs and fears
of his children, as well as the kind of battlefield general who keeps
the goals of victory to himself.

by Bill ChambersDark Skies takes place in
the days leading up to the Fourth of July.
The movie thus promises fireworks--and it delivers, albeit on a modest
scale
befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs,
it's such an insular
take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the
stage;
unlike Signs, it's not pious to a fault
(surprisingly, given that
writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion
and Priest),
and its lapses in logic aren't as maddening because they're built into
the film's
very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by
a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the
proceedings that
aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are
unfathomable to
lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs,
actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie
devices as narrative
keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a
fortress.
For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal
Activity, and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as
well; over three
films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist.
The good
news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark
Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in
Stewart's other bad
habits, like snail's pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology.
Third
time's the charm.

by Ian Pugh For Kevin James and his
co-writer, the talking cat from "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", it's not
enough that Paul Blart (James) is a fat moron prone to knocking things
over with the sheer force of his girth--he must also be completely
oblivious, fully convinced that he possesses more power and
responsibilities as a mall cop than any reasonable person would
believe. So what to do when Paul's newest trainee (Keir O'Donnell)
turns out to be a Hans Gruber wannabe who takes over the mall with his
hip young gang in a bid to clean it out? A feature-length parody of Die
Hard has
long stopped being an enticing prospect, given that Die Hard
itself has been deconstructed to death by the fact of its enormous
influence on the action genre (to the degree that the "Die Hard
in an X" template actually became the dominant model for action movies
in the 1990s), with the proverbial final nail driven in by a third
sequel, Live
Free or Die Hard, that concluded there was no point
in still pretending our everyman hero was anything but invincible. As Paul
Blart: Mall Cop sees it, the only way to endue the John
McClane archetype with any tension is to make him fat and stupid. The
first time we see Paul, he's shovelling food into his mouth, his
sweater stained with perspiration from beneath his man-boobs, shortly
before his hypoglycaemia kicks in and sidelines him from joining the
police academy. But he's got a big heart or something, and that's what
counts, right?

by
Walter Chaw One may be a misguided liberal screed and the other a
misguided conservative screed, but Sex and the City 2
and Prince of Persia:The Sands of Time
(hereafter Prince of Persia) are very much alike in
that they're what a Tea Party meeting would look like with a budget.
They're politically-confused hodgepodges of bad ideas and misplaced,
incoherent outrage--most of it gleaned from the one or two times some
idiot accidentally read the A-section of a newspaper, the rest gathered
from Dummies primers on how to be cursorily informed in the Information
Age. They're similarly infused with healthy doses of arrogance and
cultural empiricism that speak directly to the reasons the United
States is the target of fundamentalist whackos convinced we're all just
like the randy quartet of aging bitches on a hedonism bender in the
Middle East in Sex and the City 2. Hateful, vile,
both films are also indicated by a distinct lack of artistry,
representing a world post-Michael Bay in which a goodly portion of
movies are dependent on not only other cultural touchstones (a
TV series, a videogame) for the entirety of their alleged
appeal, but on some of the most vapid cultural touchstones in the brief
history of our popular culture, period.

by
Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Lesbians are pretty much
invisible in American culture--banished, actually, to the ghetto that
gay men tend to complain about even though, in truth, gay men were
never more visible than they are now that they've been gifted with the
lofty honour of being the only minority everyone can agree to hate with
hilarious impunity. A couple of programs on Showtime notwithstanding,
lesbians in the popular conversation are still either flannel-wearing
she-males, the other daughter, or male fantasies of
the voracious woman desperate for a good therapeutic dick to set her
back on the straight and narrow. When a lesbian appears in a Western
film (like in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason),
the audience, myself included, regards her appearance as a kind of
alien visitation. For a while, it's possible to forget that she's a
sexual creature at all, so foreign are her Sapphic ways in our cultural
conversation. Thus a pair of films featuring lesbian heroes front and
centre happening upon these strange shores almost simultaneously is
cause for some sort of modest celebration despite that one of them,
Alice Wu's Saving Face, is a lot like an ethnic
sitcom and the other, Alexandre Aja's High Tension,
appears to hate lesbians with an unusual ugliness.

by
Bryant Frazer With directors like
Park
Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to
reinvent
genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the
monster
movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi,
a
middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean
mythology,
formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's
featherweight
through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears
partway in,
moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to
those of
an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old
wizards
are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough
during
the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.